page_title: In Our Time (short story collection)
section_title: Themes
hierarchical_section_title: In Our Time (short story collection) / Themes
caption_attribution_description: English: T. S. Eliot, photographed one Sunday afternoon in 1923 by Lady Ottoline Morrell
context_page_description: In Our Time is Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright, New York. Its title is derived from the English Book of Common Prayer, "Give peace in our time, O Lord". The collection's publication history was complex. It began with six prose vignettes commissioned by Ezra Pound for a 1923 edition of The Little Review; Hemingway added twelve more and in 1924 compiled the in our time edition, which was printed in Paris. To these were added fourteen short stories for the 1925 edition, including "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River", two of his best-known Nick Adams stories. He composed "On the Quai at Smyrna" for the 1930 edition.
  The stories' themes – of alienation, loss, grief, separation – continue the work Hemingway began with the vignettes, which include descriptions of acts of war, bullfighting and current events. The collection is known for its spare language and oblique depiction of emotion, through a style known as Hemingway's "theory of omission".
context_section_description: The stories contain themes Hemingway was to revisit over the course of his career. He wrote about initiation rites, early love, marriage problems, disappointment in family life and the importance of male comradeship. The collection conjures a world of violence and war, suffering, executions; it is a world stripped of romance, where even "the hero of the bullfight chapter pukes". Hemingway's early-20th century is a time "out of season", where war, death, and tangled, unfulfilling relationships reign. Alienation in the modern world is particularly evident in "Out of Season", which bears similarities to Eliot's The Waste Land. Eliot's Waste Land motif exists throughout much of Hemingway's early fiction, but is most notable in this collection, The Sun Also Rises (1926), and A Farewell to Arms (1929). He borrowed Eliot's device of using imagery to evoke feeling. Benson attributes similarities between Hemingway and Eliot to Pound, who edited both.
  Motifs and themes reappear, the most obvious being the juxtaposition of life and death. There are some recurring images such as water and darkness – places of safety. Benson notes how, after reading the first few vignettes and stories, readers "realize we are in hell." Hemingway conjures a world where "the weak are pitilessly exploited by the strong, and ... all functions of life ... promise only pain."
  Hemingway's semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams is "vital to Hemingway's career", writes Mellow, and generally his character reflects Hemingway's experiences. Nick, who features in eight of the stories, is an alter ego, a means for Hemingway to express his own experiences, from the first story '"Indian Camp"  which features Nick as a child. According to critic Howard Hannum, the trauma of birth and suicide Hemingway paints in "Indian Camp" rendered a leitmotif that gave Hemingway a unified framework for the Nick Adams stories. It is followed by  "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife", which Mellows says is written with a sense of "hostility and resignation", and sheds a rare light on Hemingway's childhood. In the story, 12-year-old Nick hides from his angry and violent father; the mother, a Christian Scientist, is distanced, withdrawn in her bedroom, reading Science and Health.
  "Big Two-Hearted River", the concluding and climactic piece, details Nick's return from war. In it Nick knows he has left his needs behind; Debra Moddelmog highlights how all of the Nick storylines, and most of the others in the collection, are about a "flight from pain". She believes that Gertrude Stein's definition of the Lost Generation applies to In Our Time as much, if not more so, as to The Sun Also Rises; that "Nick seems to believe that the things most worth having and caring about – life, love, ideals, companions, peace, freedom – will be lost sooner or later, and he is not sure how to cope with this assurance, except through irony, bitterness, and, sometimes, wishful thinking." In the last story he learns to come to terms with the loss of his friends, and acknowledges "all the loss he has experienced in the last few years and, equally important, the loss he has come to expect."
caption: T. S. Eliot, shown in a 1923 photograph, influenced Hemingway's style.
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